The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to a port monitoring system for information handling systems.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
IHSs such as, for example, switches, are utilized in a network to route traffic through the network. In a variety of different situations, it may be desirable to analyze traffic transmitted by a switch to, for example, track patterns of network traffic, detect and/or determine the cause of network failures, network congestion, network bottlenecks, and/or other network problems, perform debugging, and/or for a variety of other network analysis factors known in the art. Conventionally, such analysis may be performed using a port monitoring system. For example, traffic transmitted through a switch may be monitored by mirroring packets entering or exiting a monitored port on the switch, and forwarding the mirrored packets to a monitoring port. The mirrored packets forwarded to the monitoring port may then be examined by a management system with no disruption to the flow of packets at the actual destination port.
In some situations, switches may be provided as logical switches by a plurality of physical devices that operate to provide the logical switch. For example, a logical switch may be provided by one or more controlling bridges connected to one or more port extenders, with the controlling bridge(s) controlling the logical switch and viewing each of the ports on the port extender(s) as one of a plurality of virtual ports. In such situations, conventional port monitoring may raise some issues. For example, when monitoring a physical port (i.e., the “monitored port”) on a port extender, the control bridge will mirror packets received at the virtual port associated with that monitored port. However, there is no guarantee that packets received at a virtual port are actually received at the monitored port, as those packets may be dropped at the intermediate switches, devices, or other subsystems that transmit the packet between the control bridge and the port extender. As such, conventional port monitoring in a logical switch may result in packets being mirrored to a management system when they are not actually received at the monitored port.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved port monitoring system.